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Friday, August 7, 2009

When you’re Strange . . . Beautiful

As promised, here are the last six colors from the premiere StrangeBeautiful Library of Color.

It’s amazing how polish choices can be so visceral. When I first got my haul, the dark olive color (which, for some reason, reminds me of camo), was the color I liked least. Yet when it came time to pick a color to wear, it was the first one I reached for, as I mentioned in my first post about this line.

And the last color that I finally wore? The dark teal, which by all rights should have been my itching to jump on my nails from the word “go.” But you can’t always tell which polish you will most want to wear from day to day.

Now that I’ve worn them all, I don’t think I could pick a favorite, even if forced to. There are some I like more than others, but as soon as I decide I really like one, another one falls into my field of vision, and I can’t decide. So I give – I won’t even try.

This first color is described as a “midcentury modern orange.” I’m not completely sure what that means, but I believe it’s the color (or one of the colors) whose genesis came from the Mid Century Modern Knoll Fabrics. It definitely has a “modern” feel to it, the way OPI’s The “It” Color does, with its mustard-leaning yellow. This reminds me strongly of a Sunkist orange with some black added to it.

This next color is a dark, inky blue that was, according to Jane Schub, “inspired by a fear of swimming alone in a deep dark lake at night.”

(Best of the pictures I took – sorry!)

This next one, I predict, is going to be a showstopper for many of you out there. (Scrangie, are you looking? I think I’ve got a color for you!)

This is called an “Art Nouveau teal.” It’s definitely darkened, and reminiscent of Rescue Beauty Lounge’s Stormy In fact, as Kae pointed out, the bottle designs are very similar, so I did a side-by-side shot of SB’s teal and RBL’s Stormy:

You’ll notice two things. Firstly, though the SB (on the right) appears to be larger, it is also much more narrow than the RBL. After scouring the Web (read: surfing several sites for up to ten minutes and becoming bored), I am unable to determine the size of the SB bottles. RBL is 12 milliliters, and judging from these pictures, I’ll guess that SB is about the same amount.

Secondly, this is not a dupe for Stormy. They’re in the same family, but I would consider this polish to be much more teal, and a little more “blackened,” to my eye.

(Excuse the weird marks on my nails – for the life of me I can’t see them IRL.)

Next comes this yummy chocolate brown color. Sigh. It keeps pushing to be my favorite of the group.

Here’s a lovely fuchsia. Like many in this library, it is a dark version of the color.

And last, but certainly not least, is the light pink shade of the family. In a New York Times blurb, it is said that Ms. Schub realized ‘the pink in a Warhol painting she saw at the Dia:Beacon museum [would make a wonderful nail polish]. ''It had black in it,'' Ms. Schub explained. ''It was a little off. It turned the corner from being pink to something very beautiful to look at.''’

(Try to ignore the weird state of the polish on my tips – I thought painting a swatch of white on just my nail tips was a good idea. I know. But this was awhile ago.)

So there she is, in all her glory. I don’t want to repeat my first post on these too much, so I’ll just say that they applied beautifully, and they are so pigmented that two coats has been, without exception, perfect.

Again, you can buy these from lucky scent who does have international shipping (but, whoa, is it pricey), or Bergdorf Goodman, who only ships to the US and Canada, though there is a phone number you can call and, apparently, have something shipped outside of those borders.

I’d hoped to end with The Doors’ People Are Strange, but apparently they’re not allowing that on the web. So instead here is one of my favorite scenes with Peter Sellers and Keenan Wynn from Dr. Strangelove:

I hope these are the same polishes I have. They came in a nice heavy acrylic box with a sliding lid. I should have looked up the brand when I first ordered them. Yours is the first blog that I've seen these. I thought all the colors are just beautiful.